You’re about to get the best of Content & Commerce Summit (besides being there, of course )!

Content & Commerce Summit Day 1:

Putting It All Together (Behind the Scenes of Content & Commerce Summit 2017)

It takes a lot of time.

We no sooner wrapped up last year’s Content & Commerce Summit then we started planning for 2017!

In the weeks leading up to the Summit, we packed up an 18-wheeler with everything we’d need, from couches to AV equipment.

And when it arrived in L.A. from Austin, Texas, we got to work putting tables together and prepping event bags for attendees and speakers…

…getting sponsor booths set up…

…ensuring everything was in its proper place and that the ballrooms were ready for our attendees and speakers…

…so it ultimately looks like this on opening day…

During setup, with the Emmy Awards going on next door, we kept our eyes peeled for our favorite TV stars (we’re big Game of Thrones fans at the office). Here’s our Justin Rondeau posing with the Emmy statue…

With the day before the Summit wrapping up, we threw a Welcome Reception for Content & Commerce Summit attendees. The mixer, presented by Quality Score, was complete with a taco bar and Connect Four!

I’m So Excited!

Attendees just can’t hide it. There’s an undeniable energy in the air, and that anticipation and excitement is contagious.

You can see it as people run into old friends and connect with new ones. As they go through registration and are handed their name badge and Content & Commerce Summit event bag. People are pumped!

Before the event officially kicked off, we checked in with Content & Commerce Summit attendees. Here’s what they were looking forward to most…

Watch the video below to get a look behind the curtain and to learn Ryan’s thoughts before he kicks off Content & Commerce Summit and unpacks what’s working now in digital commerce and publishing:

The Challenge on the Horizon

When you expect changes in your business, you’re able to see challenges on the horizon.

And as the opening Content & Commerce Summit video reminded the audience, the challenge on the horizon is here. With Amazon buying Whole Foods and other big box stores, like Sears, on shaky ground, the digital landscape is changing… fast!

That’s why you’re here. So you can learn what changes and challenges are coming.

Watch the full opening video here:

Are You Ready for the Changing of the Guard?

This changing of the guard is creating a rare window of opportunity that we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetime.

That’s what Ryan told attendees during his opening keynote.

And this change is being driven by Amazon.

While this may be terrifying, it’s going to be okay, Ryan assured the audience. You have a reason to exist.

What you learn during Ryan’s keynote and Content & Commerce Summit as a whole will help you deal with this change.

It’s important to remember that Amazon is not the enemy.

But they are the standard. Amazon is setting the bar that everyone must meet.

How can you compete and win in the “Age of Amazon”?

Love your customer. While that may sound like a load of fluff, stay with me here.

Make no mistake, Amazon is focusing on their customer. It’s part of their business model…

And they’re doing that by making it easy for the customer. Amazon wants to make it as easy as possible for the customer to buy and then return to buy again.

But Ryan argued that making it “easy” for the customer isn’t customer-centric.

So, how do you love your customer more than Amazon?

Talk to your customer directly using content and commerce. Content and commerce is the tactic you will use to show your customers that you care about them more than Amazon does.

We’ve identified that there are three stages to this content and commerce journey.

Each stage builds upon the next. Each stage deepens the relationship with your customer.

What are some other key takeaways from Ryan’s keynote? Well…

“In the future, the words ‘brand’ and ‘community’ will be interchangeable. And no one will be able to claim they have a brand unless they have a community to go with it.”

“If you can tell a person a story, you can capture their attention. If you can help them tell a new story about themselves, you’ll capture their hearts.”

Tell your customers where you stand, even if you think they may not like you for it. Like clothing store Chubbies does here…

There were so many great takeaways from Ryan’s keynote. We just had to share it with you! You can watch Ryan’s entire keynote here:

Welcome to the Mobile Movement

There’s no denying the importance of email. But, when it comes to reaching your customers, email is also super crowded and competitive.

It doesn’t matter how good your subject line is when your message isn’t even being seen, Oli Billson told the audience. The Founder and CEO of Oliver Billson Marketing went on to say…

So, how do we open up channels of communication we’re going to need in a sales process to complete these bridges?

In his presentation, Proven “Dynamic Response” Mobile Marketing Campaigns to Accelerate Sales, Generate More Leads, and Increase Engagement, Oli told the audience to turn to the device in their pockets and purses.

Mobile devices offer marketers a huge opportunity to reach their customers and generate sales because people find text messages less intimidating.

To fully leverage the power of the mobile marketing to accelerate your sales process, there are three “recipes” you need to employ. They are…

As Oli went on to say…

Interview with Hint Water’s Founder & CEO, Kara Goldin

A very senior exec at one of the largest soda companies in the world told her that her idea wouldn’t work. She was told that they would be roadkill within months.

But that didn’t stop Kara Goldin, Founder and CEO of Hint Water®, who went on to launch the award-winning brand in 2005.

Flavored only with natural fruit, Hint® produces a leading flavored water with no sweeteners and nothing artificial. And the company is thriving.

Before taking the Content & Commerce Summit stage, Kara tweeted…

The feeling is mutual!

Kara sat down with Roland Frasier to give the insights and strategies that helped her launch Hint®.

“Sweetie, Americans love sweets. Your product will never be anything,” that was one take on Hint® when Kara started pitching it. But Kara didn’t hear any of the criticism.

She told the audience:

Because it boils down to finding if you’re doing something and seeing if you’re getting traction with your consumers and solving their problems.

Kara went on to say to figure out your fears and challenge them…

When building her flavored water brand and wellness company, she said the three most important relationships were with…

The Customer: It’s important to remember you’re not only selling stuff but also solving the problem for your consumers. Kara said it’s important to have a dialogue — really hear what customers are saying about how your brand impacts their lives. The dialogue with the customer and ability to actually hear from them gets deeper as you build the relationship.

Her team: Those at Hint® don’t just agree with the brand’s beliefs — they live them. At Hint®, they don’t have people running around drinking Red Bull. Their team is filled with people who really want to be healthier and not just from a weight or health perspective.

Her husband: He helped co-found Hint® by trusting Kara’s vision and process and has been a cheerleader since her lightbulb moment sparked.

Include at least one EDIE tactic, or more if that makes sense, in each of your Facebook videos ads. This is a simple way to get your product message across in your video without sounding all “weird and salesy.”

“When you make content like this,” Dominate Web Media’s Founder, Keith, said about EDIE, “you’re getting to the heart of your customer. They think they are making a logical decision, but they are really justifying an emotional one.”

Step 3 is the call-to-action (CTA). Many marketers may wait till the end of their video to make their CTA. But if you want to compel people to make a purchase, consider including your CTA earlier.

Without being pitchy, include your CTA where it makes sense earlier in your video AND within the copy of your Facebook ad.

Ralph, Dominate Web Media’s Agency CEO, told the audience, “Even if they’ve only watched five minutes of a ten-minute video, give them an opportunity to buy. Make sure to include the CTA link in your post copy.”

How to Get Access to Millions of Ecommerce Testing at No Charge

DigitalMarketer’s Director of Marketing, Justin Rondeau reminded his audience that successful websites and online businesses need to do one thing and one thing only: Meet the visitor’s expectations.

What’s the easiest way to meet a visitor’s expectations? Take the most used trends by the world’s largest online retailers and apply them to your business!

For instance, users hate being forced to create an account at checkout. Making someone create an account to place an order is a surefire way to generate cart abandonment.

Multi-million dollar ecommerce stores, in most cases, give shoppers the ability to check out as a guest or “Express Checkout.”

Here’s how REI.com is handling the account creation process:

Crate & Barrel knows it too…

In the words of Justin Rondeau, “Always include guest checkout. Seriously.”

Then, if you offer free shipping (or provide it after a purchase reaches a certain value), advertise that fact early and often — from your home page to the checkout page. Free shipping is still king for ecommerce stores.

And when it comes to payment options, which there are a ton of, providing every payment option out there is actually counter-productive.

If you sell internationally, you should be using geo-targeting to make sure you are showing payment options that are best for that region. To visitors who would be MOST LIKELY to use it.

For example, Dutch visitors use the payment option IDEAL more than U.S. visitors. While a U.S. visitor could use IDEAL, it is more likely that they won’t.

So, before you list every payment option under the sun, look at the regions you do business in most. Then evaluate whether you are meeting their preferred needs with your current options.

1 = 3

In Turning 1 Customer into 3: Strategies to Turn Happy Customers into Brand Evangelists and Promoters, the Co-Founder and President of DigitalMarketer spoke about how to leverage…

Email

Facebook Messenger

Social media

Your existing customer base

…to multiply your business.

What were some of his biggest takeaways?

For starters, keep in mind that you will instantly lose ten customers if you ask a disgruntled one to review you. However, if you ask one happy customer to review you, you’ll gain three!

No matter what you sell, there are a couple of points where any customer is most excited about what they just purchased or what’s about to happen. So, make that as part of your strategy.

Encourage and enable a trigger with a series of positive rewards, slowly pushing them down the path of a customer to a promoter.

Finding Your Extra Gear

The final presentation of the night came from serial entrepreneur and endurance athlete Jesse Itzler.

He said we all have an extra gear, yet so many of us don’t know it. During his keynote, he spoke about finding his extra gear and how to tap into a reserve tank we all have, but so few of us know how to access.

He quickly had the audience enraptured.

Jesse talked about finding purpose…

“When you can find a thing you love that brings good to the world, that’s how you know what to do.”

He spoke about experience…

“Experience is over-rated. It takes too long.”

“For me, not having experience guaranteed that everything I did would have a different result because I was forced to do it differently!”

He told us to get over ourselves…

“The limitations we put on ourselves are self-imposed.”

“Once you get over the fear of being embarrassed, it’s the most liberating thing.”

He revealed how to push past our wall…

“When your brain says you’re done, you still have 40% left. The first time we experience pain, our body says, ‘stop.’ When we ignore the discomfort and tap into our reserve bank, that’s where the gold is.”

Finally, he closed by saying, “You didn’t come this far to only come this far.”

C&C Reception Presented by Maropost

Day 1 culminated in a networking party on the pool deck of the JW Marriot L.A. LIVE.

Content & Commerce Summit Day 2:

Everyone’s Here for the Same Reason

Day 2 kicked off with an opening video that reminded the audience that we’re all here for the same reason — to grow our business.

But no matter how great our product or service is, without traffic, we won’t get a conversion. Which is why Day 2 of the Summit focused on traffic and conversion strategies that will get us more sales and grow our business.

Watch the two-minute opener here:

With four sessions devoted to Amazon, the ecommerce powerhouse was a main theme of the day. Roland Frasier kicked off the Amazon focus with Day 2’s opening keynote…

10X Your Sales by Year’s End

Roland Frasier, Principal Partner at DigitalMarketer, explained how to build winning marketing campaigns that generate leads and sales. And then how to scale those campaigns with paid traffic.

He used Amazon as an example throughout his presentation of The Bezos Blitz: How to Use Amazon, Mixed Reality, Auto-bots, & 7 Other Tools, Tactics, & Strategies to 10X Your Sales by the End of This Year.

And people couldn’t get enough of it.

One of his biggest takeaways?

If they bought from you once, chances are, they’ll buy from you again! So, think about how you can sell your product again to people who have already bought from you.

He also went on to say to use FOMO (fear of missing out) or a similar tool to give visitors social proof. Do this and watch your sales soar!

The Principles and Practices of the World’s Most Dominant Companies

In the next keynote, legendary marketer, Bryan Eisenberg, revealed and demystified the principles and practices of world’s most dominant companies.

One of the dominant companies the Co-Founder of Buyer Legends focused on? You guessed it. Amazon.

In The 4 Pillars of Amazon’s Success, Bryan talked about making Amazon’s four pillars work for you.

The four pillars of Amazon include:

Customer Centricity

Culture of Innovation

Corporate Agility

Continuous Optimization

One of the ways to make Amazon’s pillars work for you is to look at your actions. Afterall, your actions express your priorities.

Quoting Simon Sinek, Bryan said: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”

Looking at your company’s actions will create customer loyalty because customers will stay loyal to a brand that they believe shares their values.

Next, it’s important to remember that your community isn’t a place to pitch because a community isn’t about you. It’s about your members and their relationship with each other. Your brand helps to facilitate this.

If you keep that in mind and do this right, you’ll build trust and loyalty with your community members. Not only do community members want to build trust with each other, they also want to build trust with your brand.

The Full Funnel Dream Team

Wait! — you may be wondering — I thought this was about funnels. Why are you asking about basketball?

Well, as Brett Curry pointed out during his presentation, treating your ad campaigns like a basketball team can revolutionize your results.

You see, the old way of thinking is that every campaign is a silo or an island. But a better way is to think of your individual campaigns as teammates.

The CEO of OMG Commerce told the audience, “This is about building a full funnel dream team. It’s beyond building a few campaigns that work and about how to make them all work together as a team to create rapid funnel expansion.”

Brett went on to explain how to combine…

Google Shopping

Search

Display

YouTube

…to feed and expand the funnel.

To do that, start by going beyond the search query with audience targeting.

Then, just like in basketball, pay attention to those assists. Track assisted conversion for top of funnel (TOFU) campaigns

Then, keep this in mind:

Elements of a High Converting Traffic Campaign

No matter where your customers enter, traffic is the road that moves people through your customer journey.

During her presentation, Molly Pittman, DigitalMarketer’s Vice President of Marketing, said there are currently three big traffic stores to choose from:

Google, which is like Yellow Pages

YouTube, which is like television

Facebook, which is like billboard ads

And because of it’s over 1.94 billion active users and easy interface, Molly said Facebook is the clear traffic store to use.

Now, keep in mind, all the traffic in the world won’t fix a bad offer. So, if your campaign is struggling, you may need to take a look at your offer.

Molly told the audience that your ad copy should explain why your offer is something that the market actually wants. Not that your offer simply exists.

Just because your offer exists, it doesn’t mean they want to click!

So, what should you do?

Explain why you’re interrupting them by explaining how your offer solves a SPECIFIC problem they’re facing. Your ad copy should focus on the Before and the After.

How your offer will transform them from the undesirable Before state to the desireable After state.

Why You Should Get a Little Crazy with Your Marketing

The final speaker of Day 2 came from a major player in the sleep industry: Casper.

Russ Henneberry sat down with Michael McCutcheon, Casper’s Director of Content, to learn the insights and views that are driving Casper’s success… and how we can apply these strategies in our own business.

Michael pointed out that a driving force is how they view themselves at Casper. He told Russ and the audience that they don’t look at themselves as a mattress company. They view themselves as a company that helps people sleep better.

That viewpoint as made all the difference.

Russ asked Michael about taking chances. He asked why the company decided to develop the “napmobile,” a bus outfitted with Casper mattresses, pillows, and sheets that tours the country so people can experience Casper firsthand.

Michael said the “napmobile” is one of his favorite things they’ve done and explained it’s helped create user-generated content.

Too Good Not to Share Quotes

Ryan Moran of Capitalism.com had some amazing takeaways in his Zero to Eight Figures with Physical Products on Amazon.

We found these quotes from his presentation thought-provoking and valuable and thought you would, too:

“You now control the media because you are the media. You drive the media.”

“The turning point from seven to eight figures is — can you take an order, and turn it into a customer?”

Ryan Moran on the math behind a seven-figure business: “If your price point on a product averages $25-35, and you can consistently and predictably take 20-40 sales a day on that product, then we need three to five products to make a seven-figure business. This is the four-minute mile for entrepreneurs.”

“The brain perceives difference as the rustle in the bush. The way that you carve out a niche in your space is by being or saying something DIFFERENT. Not better, or cheaper, but DIFFERENT.”

Our Favorites of #CCS2017

Throughout the course of Content & Commerce Summit 2017, people took to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, the Content & Commerce app, and more to share their experiences and what their big takeaways were.

These are some of our favorites:

And, here are some of our favorite takeaways from the three-day event…

And not to alarm anyone, but there were two book thieves at the event.

Don’t worry, we took care of them.

How to Leave Content & Commerce Summit with Results

Content & Commerce Summit 2017 has come to an end. Want to know the difference between leaving with great memories and leaving with results?

Write it down.

Before you leave the conference, write down what you’re going to do:

What’s the main thing you want to accomplish?

What are you going to start on first?

Because when you leave the breakout sessions, the outside world is waiting for you.

So, to keep the same focus you may have found or experienced here at Content & Commerce Summit 2017, write down what you want to get done.

During the closing ceremonies, the video below, produced by DigitalMarketer’s Christine Haas and her team, played. We feel that this video perfectly sums up the Content & Commerce Summit 2017 experience:

To everyone who attended Content & Commerce Summit, thank you all! Thank you for spending time with us.

We hope what you learned here will help you double the size of your business and help others do the same!

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